Writing About Something I've Come Back to: Our Rooms (to be continued)

      My room was always smaller than Kayla’s. Somehow, even though I’m the older sibling, I got stuck with a room almost half the size of hers. [add something here about coming from the old house that I don’t remember]. I guess she needed the space. While m room was cleaned and organized at least every weekend, Kayla’s progressively got messier. There were rare occasions when I could see her floor or make my way across to her closet where I would hide a plastic snake. Those were the times when Mom would bring up a few trashbags from downstairs, come into Kayla’s room, and threaten to start throwing away anything that wasn’t organized or put away. Sometimes they would clean her room for two days and still end up with three bags of trash to throw out. Most of the time, though, I didn’t venture in there for fear of stepping on something important buried deep within the layers of worn and unworn clothes. She had a massive work desk in the back corner of the room where she made “concoctions.” She would mix dish soap, hydrochloric acid, radishes from the garden, some body lotion, candle wax, brown sugar, and dandelion leaves into a bubbling new “skin care product.” She always made me try it. 

Treehouse: A Place Writing

We had a massive tree house in our backyard. Whenever I made a new friend, I just told them my house was the one with the castle tree house, and they’d be over that night. Dad built it by hand in 2001. I remember going to some scrap metal yard and getting two long metal playground slides to go along with our rope-net and wooden swing. Dad started sawing off pieces of the big oak tree growing next to our garden in the backyard until there was nothing but the trunk left, and he cut the top of the truck straight across to lay a 15 by 15 foot square wood floor on top. In the end, we had a castle. It was perfectly square and painted with grey bricks on the outside with four real-opening windows. Overtop, a white tarp was spread in a triangle like an old fashioned tent. We had two entrances: a ladder going up to a trapdoor entrance in the middle of the floor, and a front door that led out from the castle onto a balcony of think rope-net.

            From the net, we could climb left down the rest of the climbing net or go straight down the metal slides. The slides were attached to each other, the end of the first to the front of the second to reach the ground. We had to go slow down those slides because when the first one leveled off, the next one started to dip again, so we could fly right off the first slide and smack our tailbones on the bottom of the second if we weren’t careful. Mom warned us almost every single time we played on it not to hurt our butts. But dad was crazy with us. He would gather all the balls—basketballs, soccer balls, Wiffle balls, rubber bouncy-balls, the blue rubber football—and throw them at us while we dodged, hiding in the top of the castle. We would retaliate by throwing them back through the windows and out the front door. Sometimes we used water balloons, but that got the slides wet, so we always hurt our butts on the way down after that, and Mom would yell at Dad for being irresponsible.

            On warm nights, we would camp out in our sleeping bags in the castle, under the white tarp. Our dog, Shiloh, learned how to climb the ladder up to the trap door. We would hear a thump from under the floor and open the door to see him waiting there for us to let him in to cuddle. Dad would always let him sleep in his sleeping bag with him. But Mom never came out to the tree house. She would watch from the inside window and wait for one of us to get cold during the night and scurry inside to fall back asleep over top of the heating vents in the dining room. We would wake up with a blanket and pillow, or sometimes miraculously in our actual beds. 

Kim & Kevin - an attempt at backstory

When he was 9, my dad found a .22 lying on the table and carried it outside while Norvel and Dorris were arguing. There was some movement in the tree next to the sheep pen, so he shot over to the tree, aimed, and pulled the trigger. He’d hit an adult squirrel.

            “Dad, I shot a squirrel!” he told Norvel proudly.

            “You didn’t shoot no damn squirrel.”

            “I did, he’s a’right over there!” he pointed to the small tree by the pen.

            “Well alright. Go grab him and skin him down then,” said Norvel as he handed Kevin a gutting knife. Kevin ran back to the tree, climbed halfway up, found the squirrel and grabbed it. It was still alive. It wasn’t alive after it hit the ground though, and Kevin diligently skinned it and handed over the pelt to Norvel. He was pleased.

            “Alright, now why don’t you run down into Peoli and grab me some smokes?” asked Novel. So Kevin stood on his tippy-toes to grab the keys from the hook, started up the old red farm-truck and drove into town for cigarettes.

***

            Kevin was 16 when he started to experience puberty. He only got the muscles though, so he was still five-foot-five with no facial hair and a baby face. Out in the Peoli farm country, the hills are steep and the flat ground is sparse. Kevin and his brother Kyle would run full-bore down the steepest hills they could find, always challenging each other. As the youngest Kevin felt obligated to win every dare. They would run closer and closer to wooden and wire fences before sliding to a halt, and then one day, Kevin didn’t stop. He tucked in a front flipped right over the wooden farming fence and just kept running. He’d bet Kyle he could catch the deer out in the distance. He chased it relentlessly into the nearby patch of woods. He lost it for a second, cut through some bushes, and burst out into the small green clearing. Directly in front of him stood the deer—a large buck with massive and elegant horns. Instinctively, Kevin shot out his arm and grabbed hold of the nearest horn. The buck jumped into the air with all four hoofs off the ground, came down planted, and jerked his horn out of Kevin’s hand with an unparalleled force. Kevin reeled back, and the buck dropped to its knees and army-crawled through a patch of bushes. Kyle came up running from behind and never believed a word of it. Later, Kevin dumped a bucket of tar on him with Vince’s help. They all got covered, and Doris scrubbed them red and raw in a bathtub full of gasoline.

***

            People say Mom looked like me when she was young. At 16, she was 111 pounds of scrawny, with long, bushy red hair. In all the pictures I see, she wears a familiar goofy grin. Kim was the middle child, but always the smallest. Sue learned how to push Kim around by the time they could both walk, and Wendy, her younger sister, was born with Giantism—there was no hope for equality. Kim’s first name was Carolyn, after he mom, but the one thing she did manage to call her own was her middle name.

***

            Get up before the sun cracks over the horizon off far in the distance. Look out the window to see the red turn orange, and the orange turn yellow, and the yellow shine on green—or brown on the far fields. Clothes on, bite to eat, out the door. Mom made eggs today: no fighting until at least lunch time. Walk out to the red garage barn closest to the house. The sheep are down the hill again. Get them after midday. Hop on the new tractor and hook up the bailor. Drive out to the far field and turn that brown back to green.

            Come back for lunch. The dogs are pestering the chickens again. Yell, smack in the head, deep growl and pin to ground.

***

            Kevin left home at 16 in his 67’ Oldsmobile. He became a Jehova’s Witness and wholeheartedly believed in his message. He went door to door. He handed out flyers. He biked or ran and left his Oldsmobile by the Amish house he rented a room from. 

“Three Spheres” by Lauren Slater from Creative Nonfiction Magazine

a.      Techniques: Begins with “Initial Intake Notes,” which would not be written from her perspective but from someone else’s which she is now assumedly reading for the first time as we are. It begins the piece bonding the reader and narrator together and peaking interest in a unique way.

b.      Tone: Slater writes the first section to begin a tone of separation. She separates herself from the patient, especially in the notes at the beginning and continues to use speech that creates the “me” and the “other.” This tone switches when she lets the reader into her past in the mental institution. The tone of otherness fades away, but unwillingly, giving us the perception of growth or mental change. Slater uses more professional vocabulary toward the beginning to separate herself from the patients and uses more simple speech toward the end, which joins her back with her patients symbolically.

c.       Structure: There are 11 sections including the beginning intake notes section. Each section is a mini-scene, some more related to each other than others. But the scenes always start anew to give the narrator a fresh take on something. The sections always seem to do a pause and reset on tension or awkwardness.

d.      Tension: the tension is vague and unclear but always building toward the beginning. The reader doesn’t know why she dislikes Mount Vernon so much at first. Her anxiety about it puts the reader on edge as well. The tension has lulls and spikes as she has experiences like going to the bathroom where the patients should go.

e.      I will take from this piece the strategy of changing the vocabulary or jargon I use to write with throughout a piece to chow transformations or changes in my thought process.

f.        Q’s: Is this written as real non-fiction or as a part of a “metaphorical memoir” like the title of her earlier book? Why the birthing woman analogy at the end?